04 January 2012

Teach for America or a Peace Corps for Geeks1135_ 1/04/2012 - The National Center for Women In Technology (NCWIT) is very proud to bring the stories of incredible young women to your attention. We are talking with Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America. She recently described Code for America, "It's like a Teach for America or a Peace Corps for Geeks". People in government, senior managers with projects they think could benefit from web based solutions can make an appeal to Code for America to get volunteer help to build these projects out. This is not the first thing Jennifer has done, she's a serial entrepreneur and has extensive experience in gaming and media. Jennifer says they're a new organization having just finished up their first fellowship year. They had 19 fellows work with them all year long and work with the cities doing great projects. An example of one project is the "Adopt a Fire Hydrant App", which came out of the fact that fellows go visit their cities for five weeks. Their Boston team was treated to a massive 'snowpocalypse' and they saw the city struggling to clear the streets. They never really get to digging out the fire hydrants, but the citizens were right in front of them and they could dig them out. So the 'fellows' created a little web app that allowed the citizen to clean the fire hydrant and agree to dig it out when it snows. Jennifer's advice to a budding entrepreneur: You have to really care, deeply care about the problem you're trying to solve and think it's an important problem. And care about your people. If you don't deeply care about your work others won't either and you won't be successful. Jennifer didn't feel like an entrepreneur until she came up with the idea for Code for America. She suddenly felt she could be incredibly useful to the world and she could make a difference and it was the power of the idea and the notion that no one else was going to do it that made her start this organization. Listen for more... Related Links: Code for America || NCWIT Home || NCWIT Practice || NCWIT Blog || Heroes Channel || || Keywords: Jennifer Pahlka, Code for America, National Center for Women In Technology, NCWIT, Lucinda Sanders, Geeks, Entrepreneurs, People in Government, Apps - Bytes: 16827353 LISTEN to - Jennifer Pahlka, Founder/CEO, Code for America